Introduction This experiment consisted of two parts. In the first part, we witnessed the effect of Malus’ law by observing the consequences of angle variation between two polarizing filaments on relative light intensity. In the second part, we analyzed single and double slit diffraction patterns and used them to determine the light wavelength and slit width. The first part yielded fairly accurate results while the second part was a less consistent with accepted values of the quantities we measured. Procedure i- Polarization In the first part of the experiment, we aimed an unpolarized incandescent light source at two polarizers with an angle of 0 o with respect to each other and noted the intensity of the resultant light. After recording this as I0 we varied the angle between the polarizers by increments of 5 o until the intensity was too small to read (even on the highest sensitivity setting). We then plotted the relative intensity (I/I0 ) with respect to cos 2 θ and performed a linear fit of the form y = mx + b. We had to move the light source midway through the experiment since the readings were becoming increasingly small at 55 o and therefore created two graphs: one corresponding to the data before the move and one corresponding to the data after the move. - Diffraction

In the second part of the experiment, we utilized a diffraction pattern to model both the double slit maxima and single-slit enveloping pattern (below). Fig 1 Since the setup for obtaining the double and single slit data was identical, we simply recorded as many maxima positions as possible. We then used the data to model both the double and single slit diffraction patterns. After plotting the double slit diffraction data, we were able to determine

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